Terror Threat Intelligence Not New (+video)

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Photo Credit: APBy Bill Gertz

Intelligence regarding al Qaeda plans to attack U.S. embassies, officials, and interests last Sunday was known for months by U.S. intelligence agencies but was used only recently to trigger the closure of embassies and issuance of public warnings of impending attacks.

Al Qaeda “chatter” about coming terrorist operations, mainly against 22 U.S. embassies and consulates, and threats to attack or bomb officials in the Middle East and elsewhere was widely reported in classified intelligence reports over several months. The report said an attack was planned for Sunday, although no attack was carried out.

The intelligence was based on electronic surveillance of al Qaeda communications indicating some type of spectacular bombing or other attacks was being planned and would in fact be carried out very soon.

The timing of the administration’s announced closure of numerous U.S. embassies in the Middle East has raised concerns among some U.S. officials that the Obama administration is politicizing intelligence to distract attention from the Benghazi and other scandals.

“Why is this coming out now?” asked one official with access to terrorist threat data. “Is the administration trying to suck up news coverage with the embassy threats to distract attention from what the CIA was doing in Benghazi?”

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Intercepted communication between Al Qaeda leaders prompted terror warning, source says

By Fox News

The terror threat that led to the closure of nearly two-dozen U.S. embassies and consulates resulted from intercepted communications between the head of Al Qaeda and the leader of its Arabian Peninsula affiliate, a U.S. intelligence source tells Fox News.

The confirmation shows just how high the alleged threat goes in the terror network and is the most specific detail to emerge over the nature and origin of the threat. The source said the communications were intercepted between Ayman al-Zawahiri — who is Usama bin Laden’s successor — and Nasir al-Wuhayshi, head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Asked about the claim, officials with the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence would not confirm the details of any such intercepted communications.

Earlier in the day, officials with the White House and State Department declined to provide further specifics about the nature of the threat. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney would say only that the threat potentially goes “beyond” the Arabian Peninsula.

Carney reiterated that officials view the threat, which also prompted a worldwide travel alert last week, as “significant.”

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U.S. Directs Agents to Cover Up Program Used to Investigate Americans

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Photo Credit: ReutersA secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

“It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”

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Circuit Court: ‘Unsettled’ if 2nd Amendment Applies Outside of Home

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Photo Credit: APIn a case over New Jersey’s requirement that a citizen demonstrate “justifiable need” for a carrying a firearm before receiving a concealed carry license, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that such a requirement “does not burden conduct within the scope of the Second Amendment’s guarantee.” The court also said “it remains unsettled” whether the Second Amendment is even applicable outside one’s home.

Filed on July 31, 2013, the ruling in Drake v. Filko upheld New Jersey’s practice of placing the burden of proof upon the citizen. In other words, the citizen who wants to carry a gun for self-defense must demonstrate why doing so is necessary for him or her. In simple terms, the citizen must justify being free.

That runs contrary to previous rulings in other circuits, such as on March 6, 2012 when U.S. District Judge Benson Everett Legg ruled against Maryland’s requirement that citizens who wanted a concealed carry permit had to demonstrate a “good and substantial reason” for getting one. Overturning this New Jersey-like requirement, Legg ruled: “A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights. The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”

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Snake Escaped from Pet Shop ‘Strangles’ Two Young Boys to Death in Canada

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Photo Credit: ALAMYThe two young boys, aged five and seven, were sleeping at a friend’s apartment late on Sunday in the small town of Campbellton when they were surprised by the snake.

It had escaped from a pet store that specialised in exotic animals located on the floor below the apartment.

“The preliminary investigation has led police to believe that a large exotic snake had escaped its enclosure at the store sometime overnight, and got into the ventilation system, then into the upstairs apartment,” police said in a statement.

“It’s believed the two boys were strangled by the snake.”

A New Brunswick police spokesman declined to give further details on the size of the snake or whether signs of strangulation were apparent on the boys.

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FBI Can Hack Your Android to Remotely Activate Cell Phone Microphones

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesLaw-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can’t be wiretapped like a phone, is called “going dark” among law enforcement.

A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.’s GOOG -0.17% Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.

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Japan Nuclear Body says Radioactive Water at Fukushima an ‘Emergency’

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Photo Credit: ReutersHighly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an “emergency” that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country’s nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, told Reuters…

“Right now, we have an emergency,” he said…

It was not immediately clear how much of a threat the contaminated groundwater could pose. In the early weeks of the disaster, the Japanese government allowed Tepco [Tokyo Electric Power Co] to dump tens of thousands of metric tons of contaminated water into the Pacific in an emergency move…

“Until we know the exact density and volume of the water that’s flowing out, I honestly can’t speculate on the impact on the sea,” said Mitsuo Uematsu from the Center for International Collaboration, Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute at the University of Tokyo.

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Study Finds Late-Night Comics Using Democrats as Punchlines Post-Election (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsPresident Barack Obama, the joke’s on you.

A study of gags by late-night comics during the first half of the year found an abrupt change from 2012. Now Obama and Democrats are providing the lion’s share of punchlines.

Obama was the target of 288 monologue jokes made by Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, Craig Ferguson and Jimmy Kimmel, according to an analysis released Monday by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University.

The next most joked-about individual was New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, at 120. His numbers are likely to jump fast, since the study period was before the second round of Weiner’s sexting scandal.

In 2012, Mitt Romney was the butt of more than twice as many jokes as Obama, and Republicans were similarly the target of more than double the jokes that were made on Democrats.

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British Chancellor Accused of ‘Patronising’ Stay-at-Home Mothers

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe Chancellor today unveiled a scheme to encourage women back into the workplace by handing up to £1,200 of taxpayer-funded childcare for each child to families where both parents have a job.

He said that he had “huge respect” for stay-at-home mothers and said that the government will “help” their families by introducing tax breaks for married couples.

However Laura Perrins, a stay-at-home mother who took on the Deputy Prime Minister during a radio phone earlier this year, said that the reported £120 tax breaks were “pathetic” compared to the value of childcare vouchers.

She said: “Saying stay-at-home mothers have made a lifestyle choice is pejorative and patronising. They are contributing to the economy, to society, to everything. Staying at home is not a luxury, it’s not a hobby. Women who chose to stay at home make huge sacrifices.

“The married tax allowance is something we have been calling for but their version is pretty pathetic when compared to the childcare vouchers. We pay disproportionately more tax. They [the government] are socially engineering it, they think that stay at home mothers are not conforming to what they want.”

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The Dependably Unfaithful Colin Powell

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerIn 2008 and then again in 2012, after retired four-star General Colin Powell endorsed and then voted for Barack Obama, the former Secretary of State’s sanity was already in question. At least now, after having his email account hacked by [a] high-level security-breacher Guccifer, Colin Powell’s besmirching of the Republican Party’s “shift to the right” and “identity crisis” finally makes sense.

It seems that for years the mannerly and always professional Colin Powell has been cyber-comporting with a 46-year-old Romanian European Parliament member, Social Democrat, and past spokesperson for Romanian president Ion Iliescu named Corina Creţu. So it’s safe to say that Colin Powell was probably the one in the throes of an “identity crisis.”

As vice chair of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, Corina Creţu, who once called Powell the “love of her life,” had, on occasion, spoken out against cruelty to women worldwide. Yet thanks to her progressive mindset, seducing in hopes of ‘sharing’ someone else’s husband must not be a problem for her.

Photo Credit: American Thinker

The fact that Colin Powell would associate with a communist sympathizer, never mind carry on titillating banter with a woman 30 years his junior, indicates risky and immature behavior just a notch above Weinergate. Either way, the revelations do put into context Powell’s ability to support progressive socialist Barack Obama. General Powell lowered standards within his marriage, which apparently translated into lower standards politically.

Not for nothing, but it is kind of ironic that Colin Powell, whom many believed voted for Barack Obama simply because he’s black, cyber-cheated on his African-American wife Alma with a blonde Marxist from Romania.

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At Least 3 Killed in Shooting at Pennsylvania Municipal Building

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Photo Credit: APAt least three people were killed when a gunman opened fire at a Pennsylvania municipal building during a meeting, before he was tackled by a local official and shot with his own gun, a witness said.

The shooting, which also injured some people, happened shortly before 7:30 p.m. during Ross Township’s monthly meeting, Monroe County emergency management director Guy Miller said.

The gunman, who Miller said appeared to be “shooting randomly,” was conscious and taken out on a stretcher following the shooting, witnesses told the Pocono Record.

Miller said the gunman was captured and was treated at a hospital, which was placed on lockdown. The shooter later was released into police custody, said the hospital, which was treating two shooting victims.

State police in Lehighton confirmed the gunman had been captured but didn’t immediately have details on the arrest.

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